Features in Tomcat 7 – Updates and improvements
With new version of Tomcat, 7.0.12, several new features were introduced while other enhanced.
Overall service improvement is significant toward prior versions so through some working examples they'll be described in review below.
So, let's see which features are introduced as new ones and which ones been enhanced and improved from last version.
New features
1.Preventing cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks with use of nonce
2.Changing the jsessionid on authentication to prevent session fixation attacks altogether
3.Memory leak detection and prevention
4.Storage of static content outside the war file with use of aliases
Analyzing xferlog file
I wanted to write a few sentences on the xferlog, since I know that not many people pay attention to it, but it really can be useful.
For example, you have an ftp user who does some actions, deletes files, writes file, reads, etc. All these actions are stored with timestamp in xferlog.
System administrator can find out specifically what happened with the files, that are stored or delete, who deleted them, and when.
It is usually located in /var/log/xferlog
yum vs apt-get differences
Hope you all, readers, had a great day so far.
I want today to present yum vs apt-get differences. I'm sure a lot of users use Fedora Core, and are thinking about switching to Ubuntu or Debian.
The major difference between these systems is your ultimate application for installing, updating and managing packages for the distribution.
For those users who are switching from Fedora to Ubuntu, the yum tool is replaced with another great tool apt-get.
Installing is basically the same, you do 'yum install package' or 'apt-get install package' you get the same result.
Viruses, Trojans, how to protect your website
In the past, viruses have only attacted personal computers that shared the same external memories like diskettes, cds, etc.
A while then, they started spreading over the network.
Today, viruses are being spread to your website. Now, how do they do that ?
Network speed and how it effects your website
Often people associate offered bandwidth with network capability. Those are in fact, two different terms.Bandwidth is associated with amount of data you can transfer (both up to your server + and down from your server) in a period of time. Network capability, on the other hand will have a direct impact on the speed of your website and quality of one enjoying your content and online media.Your search engine ranking is also affected by your network uptime and network speed. Your visitors will return if they enjoyed your website's response.
Let us look at number of factors that affect your network capabilities.
MC intro
I wanted to write a couple of sentences about my linux enviroment.When I work on the shell, I often make use of GNU MC commander, which I discovered quite recently.I guess, that habit I inherited from my Windows enviroment, as I'm used to Windows Commander.
I noticed that not so many professionals working on the shell use MC on daily bases, like I do. It's not necessery for a professional System Administrator to use it, but I think you will get the idea why I'm introducing it to you.
MC (GNU Midnight Commander) is a console file manager, it's free and open source.It can be used remotely in the console or any graphical enviroment.It's main interface consists of two panels, just like in Windows Commander.User can use arrow keys, shortcuts etc. and he can make use of any tool, that you would normally use in console (copy/rename/remove/make directory/etc).User can also rename a group of files, which is particulary handy, knowning that it's a little complicated thing to do in shell enviroment.
Anyhow, for full feature list, get the rpm package, install it, and press F4 for help 
Shared vs. VPS (advantages/disadvantages)
Shared hosting is a service where hosting provider sells accounts on one server where can multiply websites be hosted.
It is a very popular way of hosting the website, as it can be quite cheap and useful for small websites not spending alot of resources.
The main disadvantage of the shared hosting is that you are basily living in the same enviroment as other websites.
That can put a question of theoretical risk for your data security, for your emails going through (You all are sending it from one ip address, if one is spamming, all are considered spammers), resource measurment, etc...
Google optimization
During the weekend I was researching some papers and online forums for google optimization. I was doing it mainly for my own website though, but I wanted to share with the world what I have learned so far.
Google is fastly modifying it's algorithm. It is looking at more and more things to "harvest" the right websites with matched phrases and keywords.
So here we go:
- the name of the page should contain a phrase or topic of the page.
That way search engine will known for certain it's about “that” in page.
APF as a firewall tool
Working in a hosting company brought some standards of use. Personally, I always have a handy premade set of "iptables" rules in one file which I copy and modify at need for my servers, like I suppose majority of system administrators do.
Although I do manage APF tool on my work, just recently I have put it in my personal use.
APF is netfilter (iptables based) firewall system designed to cover all advanced needs of your workstation for net filtering.I will just mention a few of its features that are most interesting to me and maybe will draw your attention:
- Detailed and well commented configuration file (very easy to modify and adjust to user's personal needs)